The contemporary distrust of the elites have had a decided outcome for the media in many countries. I can’t say that the malaise affects every single country in the world, but I suspect that it does. Others will have to fill me in with details about what happens to the media in their place of residence.
You see it all the time. It might be quite mild and so seem innocuous. In Australia, there is a certain type of left-wing culture warrior (LWCW) who uses the moniker “MSM” to refer to the mainstream media. According to this person, the MSM has been captured by the conservative party (which is called the Liberal Party in this country). The distrust extends to the traditionally progressive Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the national broadcaster, which they think has been coerced by the Liberal Party into supporting its policies. In response, this type of person supports what they call “indie” media, often with a subscription, even though these outlets (there are a few of them) only run stories that are hideously biased in favour of the left. They also don’t have subeditors, so the syntax and grammar are frequently unreliable, making their stories hard to read.
Then you have a relatively more aggressive type of hatred of the media. This is the kind that Donald Trump embraces in the US. According to Trump, the mainstream media is hideously biased in favour of the Democratic Party, and so (again, according to him) they hate his policies and attack him on every possible occasion. Trump evidently doesn’t think much of the First Amendment to the Constitution but with the Republicans any level of rank stupidity is hardly surprising. Recently, in Texas, a journalist was actually manhandled by a Trump conference delegate, presumably as a kind of tribute to his leader. In June last year five people, including four journalists, were shot dead in their office in Maryland by a disgruntled citizen with a gun.
Then you have governments attacking the media, as exemplified by the criminal imprisonment of Australian journalist Peter Greste in Egypt from 2014 for a period of 400 days due to his interviewing members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood. Or else you have the more recent arrest of Maria Ressa in the Philippines on charges of libel sparked by stories that her organisation, Rappler, had published that were critical of a judge. She has also written stories critical of the president of the country, Rodrigo Duterte.
The thing that all of these behaviours have in common is their making light of the importance of journalism in the conduct of democracy. For these people – the Australian LWCWs on Twitter, Donald Trump, and Philippines President Duterte – journalists are only useful if they say things in public that are favourable to them. Any view or any story that conflicts with their inherent bias is considered to be an attack. These people fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of the media in a healthy polity. It is not there to make people feel good. It is there to ask questions that no-one else has the time or the courage to ask. And it is there to make the powerful feel uncomfortable.
If you want to see what happens when you don’t have journalists to do the work of keeping the powerful accountable, just take a look at the Paladin affair (which had its own hashtag on Twitter that was still going strongly on Saturday of last week). I started watching this slow-motion train-wreck on Friday. On that day, I posted on Facebook:
You see it all the time. It might be quite mild and so seem innocuous. In Australia, there is a certain type of left-wing culture warrior (LWCW) who uses the moniker “MSM” to refer to the mainstream media. According to this person, the MSM has been captured by the conservative party (which is called the Liberal Party in this country). The distrust extends to the traditionally progressive Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the national broadcaster, which they think has been coerced by the Liberal Party into supporting its policies. In response, this type of person supports what they call “indie” media, often with a subscription, even though these outlets (there are a few of them) only run stories that are hideously biased in favour of the left. They also don’t have subeditors, so the syntax and grammar are frequently unreliable, making their stories hard to read.
Then you have a relatively more aggressive type of hatred of the media. This is the kind that Donald Trump embraces in the US. According to Trump, the mainstream media is hideously biased in favour of the Democratic Party, and so (again, according to him) they hate his policies and attack him on every possible occasion. Trump evidently doesn’t think much of the First Amendment to the Constitution but with the Republicans any level of rank stupidity is hardly surprising. Recently, in Texas, a journalist was actually manhandled by a Trump conference delegate, presumably as a kind of tribute to his leader. In June last year five people, including four journalists, were shot dead in their office in Maryland by a disgruntled citizen with a gun.
Then you have governments attacking the media, as exemplified by the criminal imprisonment of Australian journalist Peter Greste in Egypt from 2014 for a period of 400 days due to his interviewing members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood. Or else you have the more recent arrest of Maria Ressa in the Philippines on charges of libel sparked by stories that her organisation, Rappler, had published that were critical of a judge. She has also written stories critical of the president of the country, Rodrigo Duterte.
The thing that all of these behaviours have in common is their making light of the importance of journalism in the conduct of democracy. For these people – the Australian LWCWs on Twitter, Donald Trump, and Philippines President Duterte – journalists are only useful if they say things in public that are favourable to them. Any view or any story that conflicts with their inherent bias is considered to be an attack. These people fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of the media in a healthy polity. It is not there to make people feel good. It is there to ask questions that no-one else has the time or the courage to ask. And it is there to make the powerful feel uncomfortable.
If you want to see what happens when you don’t have journalists to do the work of keeping the powerful accountable, just take a look at the Paladin affair (which had its own hashtag on Twitter that was still going strongly on Saturday of last week). I started watching this slow-motion train-wreck on Friday. On that day, I posted on Facebook:
The LWCW are currently going berserk over a company called Paladin that was awarded a security contract by the government to operate on Manus Island. Literally scores of people are jumping up and down, totally going batshit over this "scandal" but the only story that's appeared so far has been a paywalled one on the [Australian Financial Review] website. One of the reliable LWCWs in the media, Ben Eltham, who oddly enough teaches at a university, has helped to fan the flames of outrage over the affair but so far I haven't been able to read a story about it on a website I have access to.Later the same Friday I posted about it again:
"There is big corruption here on Manus in the contracts between Aus gov & the companies it pays to maintain this system. It's time to investigate all the contracts incl. Paladin & IHMS. If Aus taxpayers knew how much corruption it would bring this gov down." This quote from the guy who won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award, Behrouz Boochani. It sort of sums up the tone of his book, too, by the way. Plenty of feeling but not much truth. I doubt this Paladin thing will last more than a day or so before being forgotten by the demos and the media alike.Boochani is a resident of Manus Island and he has a large following of LWCWs on the mainland. On Saturday I posted this:
So the Paladin thing is still going today but now with everyone on Twitter pretending they're a journalist two different companies with the same name are getting confused. And a Guardian journalist (who has the ability to sit down and actually write a story about the affair) is telling people to ignore a particular class of detail that is being enthusiastically retailed by every man and his dog. It's a shambles. This is public interest journalism 2019 because, you know, you cannot trust the MSM.The Sydney Morning Herald and the Guardian still had not put up a story about the company at this time. Late in the afternoon Serkan Ozturk, one of the internet’s Australian “indie” journalists, whose True Crime News Weekly website had broken the Barnaby Joyce baby-out-of-wedlock story in 2017, posted this:
So it turns out the CEO of Paladin is a former Director of General Strategic Logistics at the Australian Defence Force and was also a Commander of a brigade of 2,500 people. On his LinkedIn, he doesn’t mention he is the CEO of Paladin though...By Sunday morning the hashtag had disappeared from the trending list on the Twitter website, and I posted this:
The Paladin thing grinds on with all the pathetic resolve of a summer flu. One guy has put on his journalism cap and gone to the company's website to have a look. He thinks the website is pretty subpar and so, in a flash, concludes that the company didn't deserve to get the government contract to provide security services in the offshore refugee camps. More brilliant work by a citizen journalist. Take that, you fiendish government stooges!Also on Sunday morning, Paul Karp, a Guardian journalist, tweeted at around 9.30am:
Christian Porter says there was a "full independent commonwealth procurement process" for the $423m Paladin contract.This was in relation to Porter, the attorney-general, appearing on the ‘Insiders’ program, where he was interviewed by host Barrie Cassidy. Karp added, linking to the AFR story that had gone up the week before: “NB: the AFR reports the tenders were closed.” Someone at around 8.45am on Sunday tweeted ominously:
#PaladinAffair smells like something big enough to bring down a government.Echoing the idea and the tone it was conveyed in, Ozturk tweeted with a weird kind of breathless sententiousness at about lunchtime on Sunday:
If you connect the whole #PaladinAffair together we have a case of a privatised quasi-version of the [Australian Defence Force] engaging in ripping off taxpayers & refugees. This fiasco should go down as of the one nation’s biggest ever political AND military scandals and there should be consequences.You can’t fault a guy for trying, it has to be stated, but at this point to do the whole thing justice you need to insert one of those musical segments like something out of Beethoven, starting high and with a minor progression ending on a low note. “Dum dum dum duuuuum.” On Sunday evening an Ipsos poll result came in that showed the Liberals had narrowed their deficit to Labor to two points (49 to 51) after having trailed in other opinion polls by up to ten points in recent weeks.
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